business x learning x social media

August 15, 2010

Last week you saw me use, review and recommend Easy Video Player as a powerful new entry in video-based marketing and video publishing tools. I won't go into the details in this post since I've already written about it here and here.

In this post, I just wanted to update you about it now officially being on my "Mel Recommends list." Find it, and other marketing / productivity applications I've endorsed in the topline menu bar above.

If you have questions about how I've used any of the applications listed there, drop me a line. (No technical support questions, please... unless, of course, you're an existing client. In which case researching your technical support question with the vendor will likely already be bundled in with our coaching or training arrangement.)

Otherwise, feel free to ask me about how I use the application itself, strategies for use, productivity applications or marketing techniques.

What are your thoughts? Have you used any of the applications and/or services in my list. What has been your experience?

August 12, 2010

Maybe you're one of the few, the proud, the people who've learned to add a video to your website. But, do you know how to add a website into your video?

Well, okay. Maybe I'm stretching a bit to say that an opt-in form can technically be an entire website. But, to the extent that it's all html, right...?

My point is, wouldn't it be slick to be able to add an opt-in form inside your video?

In that way, as soon as the video is done playing, it displays an opt-in form within the frame of the video player so that your visitor can immediately perform the call to action you make in the video?

This isn't actually a new technique. I was doing stuff like this a few years ago. Fact is, opt-in forms, buttons and redirect actions associated with a web video has been do-able for a few years. But, very few peeps actually do it in regular practice because the code-level know-how of pulling that off has been a bit, well, cumbersome. Some software programs facilitated some of that for you, but by and large it was all very clunky.

In fact, since it's basically html code, so when you start thinking along the lines of embedding a PayPal Buy button, or automatic redirects to a shopping cart page or some other landing page, the marketing implications become even more powerful.

From an eLearning perspective, short of having your own LMS (Learning Management System), you can implement a rudimentary sequence of training videos where the user automatically redirects to the next video in the sequence either automatically or after the push of a button that appears within the frame of the video player.

I'm impressed, but a couple of drawbacks.

The application is essentially platform independent (it works with Macs just as well as PCs) because the software installs on your server.

There are a couple of drawbacks. One is that I'd like to see the ability for bulk uploads of videos to my Amazon S3 video storage. But, until they get this enhancement implemented, it's easily worked around by simply using an FTP program to upload your videos to the appropriate storage folder ("bucket") on Amazon S3.

And the other drawback is that I wish the software would allow for my visitors to swipe the embed code and place it on their site (which it allows), but in such a way that the embedded video then also displays my opt-in form on their site when the video completes its play.

Now, I want you to pause and think about that for a moment. When the marketing / lead generation aspect of that sinks in, your eyes should appropriately widen. That's almost unfair in its power.

Essentially, if the software were to in fact work that way, that would mean that anybody who has your video embedded in their site will essentially operate as a list-building outpost for you.

Note: I can't definitively say yet that this is NOT the case. I swapped emails with tech support briefly. They seem to imply that it's supposed to work exactly the way I described above. I need to follow up on this because I haven't yet been able to make it behave in that way. But if they're right, this is huge.

In any case, what's already in the package that I've been experimenting with this week has me sufficiently impressed that I finally affiliated-up and am endorsing it with my signature. I do that only rarely.

If you want to see a working version of it, click here. You'll be taken to a landing page I set up as an affiliate site. I also made a follow up video screencast that shows you how I use the software to place my aWeber webform into one of the videos.